Information Conservation Without Retrievable History

This technical note addresses the black hole information problem by separating information conservation from information retrievability. Standard formulations implicitly assume that conserved information must remain readable as spacetime history, leading to apparent conflicts between unitarity, locality, and evaporation. Within a substrate-based framework, information is conserved as incremental quantum transition records embedded in a non-geometric constraint ledger, rather than as retrievable microstate histories. Every realized quantum transition is conserved globally, but the absence of geometry, locality, and causal ordering at the substrate level renders the accumulated record permanently unreadable as history. Black holes are treated not as information storage regions, but as collapse channels that translate geometric degrees of freedom into substrate-level constraint updates. Hawking radiation governs the loss of geometric retrievability, not the loss of information itself. This reframing resolves the black hole information paradox without invoking hidden interiors, holographic encoding, nonlocal retrieval mechanisms, or causal violation. The note is intended as a concise conceptual clarification rather than a complete theory.